GORBACHEV IN CHINA: The Communist Summit : Eyewitness to History in Beijing

“It is well to remember that one eyewitness, however dull and prejudiced, is worth a wilderness of sentimental historians.”

The words are from “Indiscreet Letters from Peking,” B. L. Putnam Weale’s 1906 account of China’s Boxer Rebellion.

It’s now the People’s Republic of China, the capital is known as Beijing and the rebellious protesters in Tian An Men Square are poles apart from the fanatical, foreign-hating Boxers of an earlier era. Yet Weale’s description of “extraordinary scenes” also applies to the sights now appearing on the television screen.

A different time, a different eyewitness.

Monday: “What is the mood of the students right now?” asked “CBS This Morning” co-host Harry Smith from New York.

“It’s serious, determined, but you do not see in the faces . . . rage,” Dan Rather replied from Beijing.

Only on TV do journalists formally debrief each other and seek to define the “mood” of an enormous throng, as if more than 50,000 faces in massive Tian An Men Square were monolithic and could be read simultaneously.

So be it. At least credit CBS News--along with CNN--for instigating a heavy and continuing presence in China for this week’s historic Sino-Soviet summit and remarkable pro-democracy protests by thousands of students and others. While CBS and CNN are anchoring newscasts from Beijing, ABC and NBC are treating the story as a spot news event.

It’s striking how recent radical shifts in global politics have altered coverage by television. In the pre- glasnost age of only a few years ago, no one would have seriously contemplated American TV mounting intensive coverage of a Communist leader abroad, visiting another Communist leader.

Richard Nixon in China, yes. Ronald Reagan in China, yes. But a Soviet leader in China or elsewhere, attempting to patch relations with another Communist leader? Unthinkable.

But there in Cuba recently was Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, schmoozing with Fidel Castro under the gaze of the American networks, which deployed their nightly newscasts there for this potentially momentous event.

And there in China, with CBS and CNN also there in a big way, is Gorbachev again, for talks with Chinese leaders that may thaw Sino-Soviet relations.

One thing the coverage shows is that changing “the face of Communism,” as Rather put it, may be easier than changing the face of network news.

When Rather, ABC’s Peter Jennings or NBC’s Tom Brokaw anchors from abroad, the skeletal meagerness of their 22-minute newscasts becomes all the more evident. Such is the case with Rather in China, where the Sino-Soviet story and domestic unrest are filling most of “The CBS Evening News” hole, requiring a de-emphasis on other events, no matter their significance. Twenty-two minutes are the news equivalent of electronic anorexia--inadequate and dangerously unhealthy.

Not that the Sino-Soviet story has advanced very far on TV in any event. In contrast to its speculative, leak-reporting, rumor-exposing role in summits co-starring U.S. Presidents, American TV this time appears to have traveled a long way only to be a spectator and seems separated by an invisible Great Wall from the behind-the-scenes nitty-gritty of the political story. In reporting on Gorbachev Tuesday morning, CBS correspondent Susan Spencer quoted information from a “Soviet reporter.” And even Raisa Gorbachev, so prominent and overreported in coverage of the Gorbachev-Reagan summits, has been relegated to minor footnote status.

CNN’s Bernard Shaw is leading the American TV field in incisive questioning from Beijing, asking Winston Lord, former U.S. ambassador to China, for example, to compare the significance of the summit with the massive pro-democracy demonstrations.

“The latter has the potential to be more historic, but the jury is still out,” replied Lord, not too incisively, from New York. Lord did wonder aloud, however, if the freedoms being accorded protesters would vanish once Gorbachev and the hordes of Western media have vanished.

So many voices silenced? The demonstrations have yielded extraordinary pictures, with idealistic and spirited students in colorful headbands shown on CNN evoking memories of Woodstock. On CBS Monday night, students and police were shown singing-- singing --at each other, like dueling choruses. And in openly condemning her nation’s education system, one Chinese student supported her argument with a quote not from Confucius, but from Abraham Lincoln.

When hard news was unavailable, there were features.

They’ve ranged from Jeanne Moos’ charming video postcard on CNN--yes, the Beijing Sheraton Hotel does offer a mini-Great Wall for tourists without time for the real thing--to Charles Kuralt’s poignant story on CBS about a Chinese man who once let the government think for him, but now thinks for himself. When journalists marched in the streets for greater freedom, he was among them.

It seems so . . . exhilarating, so irreversible, so optimistic. “Harry, I wish you were here now,” Rather said to Smith Monday morning. “This is one of those stories. This is so unique. . . .”

On Tuesday morning, Rather seemed somewhat less buoyant. “There is going to be change,” he told Smith regarding the demonstrations, “but change to what?” And for how long?

An eyewitness should be cautious in evaluating change in a land where not everything is as everlasting as it seems.

In Shaanxi Province, a vast terra-cotta army guards the grave mound of Qin Shihuangdi, the first emperor of China. What an amazing sight. Discovered by archeologists in 1974, the burial complex is on a scale befitting a man who believed he had founded a dynasty that would last 10,000 generations.

It fell three years after his death.